Deep Design

In nine ambitious essays of uncommon erudition, art historian Libby Lumpkin constructs quirky condensed histories that suggest an alternative approach to art writing — strangely intelligent and wildly spirited. She argues that post-atomic New Mexico has become this nation’s repository for popular ideas of redemptive nature; that Western culture’s denial of chance and contingency accounts for much of today’s academic cottage industries; and that the persona of the showgirl, whose origins she traces to ancient Assyria, might serve as the emblem for a feminism grounded in the social relations of power. Even the ubiquitous “smiley face” attracts her analysis in an imaginative iconography of the smile from the art of archaic Greece and first-century India to Leonardo da Vinci and Andy Warhol